Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Warm greetings from Shantou University! I hope this message finds you busy but well!
As Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the 9th ELC International Conference on Revisiting ELT Practices in Multicultural Contexts: Evidence-Based Practices, I am very pleased to tell you that my colleagues at the English Language Center (ELC) have been working very diligently to create a great forum for you and fellow TESOL professionals to present and share your rich teaching/research experiences and new ideas. I am particularly happy to share with you that 2018 marks the 15th anniversary of the establishment of our ELC (offically opened in 2003). A year earlier, in 2002, with the generous support of the Li Ka Shing Foundation, STU successfully started the English Enhancement Programme under the leadership of a visionary lady Ms. Julia Hsiao, the then Vice Chancellor of STU. The last 15 years have witnessed the healthy growth and great development of ELC in terms of curriculum design, communicative approach for language teaching, co-curricular activities and services (such as those offered at our Center for Independent Language Learning -- CILL) as well as the building of an innovative and competitive team of TESOL professionals and researchers from China’s Mainland and around the world.
I am extremely proud to tell you that we have invited leading scholars from the TESOL research international community who will speak at this conference in April 2018. Apart from the three former directors of ELC – Prof. Jun LIU (Stony Brook University, USA), Prof. Claudia KUNSCHAK (Ritsumeikan University, Japan) and Prof. Don SNOW (Duke Kunshan University, China), we have the honour and privilege of inviting Prof. Ken HYLAND (University of East Anglia, UK), Prof. John MACALISTER (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), and Prof. RAN Yongping (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China). Their presence and presentations at the conference will be a great source of inspiration for us all.
Colleagues and friends, with your valuable participation and our commitment to serving you and facilitating discussions, we are expecting a great forum to exchange innovative ideas, an open platform to demonstrate best practices, a spacious arena to display original research and a warm reunion to share our learning/teaching experiences in and out of the conference hall. As ELT practitioners and researchers, we need to address a whole range of ELT issues in relation to our various teaching practices and diverse cultural settings.
Here at ELC, while being firmly committed to the mission of cultivating in our students such attributes as “Proficiency”, “Autonomy”, “Sustainability”, “Intercultural Competence”, and “Critical Thinking”, we have been seeking a bridge between traditional approaches and innovative theories regarding the incorporation of new technology and online learning platforms into ELT such as Moodle and Arguendo. At the 2016 conference, we officially launched Shantou University’s ELC Arguendo：The Chatwood Forest Learning Management System for Structured Dialogue and Critical Thinking, a digital platform for teaching/learning core communication and reasoning skills. In the 2017 Fall semester, apart from the integration of Arguendo into our ELC Level 4 course for STU students, ELC started a special MOOC course, “Arguendo: Critical Thinking and Argumentation Skills” in an attempt to further develop students’ logical thinking through the online use of this platform.
The ELC at Shantou University is an innovative and professional institution, and I am very proud of what my colleagues do and also what has been achieved. It is with great pride, hope and sincerity that I warmly invite you to come and share your research and experience with us at the conference.
Looking forward to welcoming you to the beautiful campus of Shantou University in April 2018, if not earlier!
Professor Mao Sihui (PhD)
Director of ELC & Dean of College of Liberal Arts
Shantou University
Chairman of the Organizing Committee